The engineering issues are cool to think about. Setting out to build the whole sphere at once is too much of an all-or-nothing thing IMHO. Instead, build a rela

The engineering issues are cool to think about. Setting out to build the whole sphere at once is too much of an all-or-nothing thing IMHO. Instead, build a relatively small solar satellite in orbit around the sun at the chosen distance, maybe between Mars and the asteroid belt. Then build another one, and connect them together. Keep doing that, working towards a ring around the sun. That part should be relatively simple, since each of the pieces would be in a stable orbit by itself. If you still need more power after that, then you consider the ring to be the equator of a sphere, and start building out the rest of the sphere, one ring of latitude at a time. Maybe build it as a basic grid or something initially, and add the solar collectors as needed. The stress would probably start to get higher and higher as you built up and down, since the pieces wouldn't be in orbit anymore, and so would rely on the structure to keep them in position and connected. The problems in getting started are probably more along the lines of needing the kind of robot technology to gather the materials and build something like the initial satellite without much supervision, being able to gather the energy, and being able to do something useful with it.